This blog is about my new Civil War history, Our War: Days and Events in the Fight for the Union.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Taking Richmond (part two)

Contemporary colorized engraving of the burning of Richmond. The fires began as an effort by troops under Lt. Gen.
Richard S. Ewell to burn the city's tobacco, cotton and food to keep them from the Union army. Residents enraged
by the burning of the food rioted and looted. In the end Ewell's men could control neither the mob nor the fires.

Well before dawn on April 3, 1865, and before great fires lit
the sky at the horizon, Capt. George A. Bruce of the 13th New Hampshire Volunteers
noticed the silence. He had been on watch all night, but this was no routine
shift. Rebel deserters coming into the Union camp had reported that Robert E.
Lee’s army was retreating, opening Petersburg and Richmond to capture.

Bruce was in charge of the sentinels who stood guard at the
front line beside their campfires. All had heard news, or at least rumors, of
Lee’s withdrawal. “Every soldier was standing, with musket leaning against the
ground, peering into the gloom, with every faculty strained to catch some note
in confirmation of the glad tidings,” Bruce wrote.

Occasionally he heard the baying of a dog in the distance, but there was
no other sound.

Soon the sky above Richmond caught the garish light of the
flames below. “The whole northern circle of the heavens” glowed, Bruce wrote,
and then another line of fires appeared above the James River.“While we were
standing almost speechless, wondering at the scene, just to our left a huge
volume of smoke like an illuminated balloon shot high into the air, followed by
an explosion that shook the earth under our feet. The echoes
rumbled heavily along the banks of the river and then died away in the
distance.”

This was the explosion of the rebel ironclad Richmond – the first of many explosions that
destroyed the Confederates’ James River fleet.

Bruce’s division commander, Brig. Gen. Charles Devens, had
given him authority to act if the need arose. And now it had, it seemed to
Bruce. He ordered the pickets forward, and no opposing
picket line rose up to meet them.

Bruce and Cpl. George Duncan of the 9th Vermont rode through.
Bruce stopped a deserting Confederate soldier and ordered him to guide them to the rebel
entrenchments. They passed through three sturdy lines of obstructions with buried
torpedoes between them and then reached long, parallel rows of empty tents. Bruce retraced his
path and led his men forward. He lost one man, a Vermonter who strayed from the march route and stepped on a torpedo. Beyond the rebel tents Bruce re-formed his skirmishers into a line.

As the day broke, Bruce secured Confederate forts and batteries,
leaving sentinels at each along the half-mile of the corps’s front. Devens sent
orders not to advance, but Bruce rode back to tell him the order had come too
late. He found the general at his headquarters and said he had already taken
Fort Gilmer and the rest of the Confederate line. Devens shook his hand and
said, “Hail to thee, Count of Gilmer.”

It was 5 a.m. Devens sent word to Gen. Godfrey Weitzel, the
corps commander. By 6 Weitzel had ordered the division on to Richmond.
Devens told Bruce to use his pickets as skirmishers, and Bruce pushed them as
fast as he could. It took little prodding. The men “pressed on joyously, with a quick step and light hearts,”
he wrote. “It was a refreshing march in the pleasant hour of a delightful
morning.”

Along the way they saw green fields and an occasional
abandoned farmhouse. They picked up rebel stragglers by the dozen. One saluted Bruce and asked how much the Union army was paying for arms and
equipment.As Bruce’s men neared the Confederate capital’s inner
defenses, they ascended a hill and got their first good view of Richmond.

“The city was wrapped in a cloud of densest smoke, through
which great tongues of flame leaped in madness to the skies,” wrote Bruce. “A
few houses on the higher hills, a spire here and there half smothered in smoke,
and the hospitals to the east, were the only buildings that could be seen.

“Added to the wild tumult of the flames, ten thousand shells
bursting every minute in the Confederate arsenals and laboratories were making
an uproar such as might arise from the field when the world’s artillery joins
in battle. But just on the verge of this maelstrom of smoke and fire, cattle
were grazing undisturbed on the opposite hillside, and I saw a farmer ploughing
in a field while cinders from the burning capital were falling at his feet.”

Rockett's Landing on the James River near Richmond

His men halted on the
outskirts of Richmond at Rockett’s Landing, a port for the rebel capital. Soon
an open barouche approached carrying Joseph Mayo, Richmond’s mayor, who had
come to surrender the city.

His message read: “The Army of the Confederate Government
having abandoned the City of Richmond, I respectfully request that you will
take possession of it with an organized force, to preserve order and protect
women and children and property.”

Mayo’s brother, who was with him, told Bruce a mob had taken
over the capital and no one was fighting the fires. The brother owned Powhatan,
an estate on the James River nearby. Bruce sent a soldier with him to ease his
fears that his mansion and plantation would be looted and destroyed.

Flag captured from the CSS Hampton by Capt. William J. Ladd

Bruce now saw Devens’s division – his division – marching up behind the skirmishers to occupy Richmond. The leading brigade entered
first, moving rapidly because of the flames, explosions and chaos ahead. The brigade's commander, Edward H. Ripley, of Rutland, Vt., had risen from the rank of private in the 9th Vermont Volunteers to brevet brigadier general.

Among the working-class residents of Rockett’s Landing, Bruce first observed how the war had affected southern civilians. “Handkerchiefs
and strips of cotton cloth as flags of truce were pinned on the door-casements
of the houses, from which women and children came out with piteous appeals for
food,” he wrote. The Union men had nothing to share but returned as soon as they
did.

Capt. William J. Ladd -- first to Richmond?

Midstream in the James the soldiers saw a Confederate flag flying
above a gunboat. Capt. William J. Ladd of Portsmouth, N.H., Bruce’s tent-mate
and another 13th New Hampshire officer on Devens’s staff, rowed out to the boat
and retrieved the flag. Just as he returned to shore, the gunboat exploded.

After the war, many men claimed to have been the first Union
soldier to enter Richmond that morning. Bruce had read obituaries of “soldiers
in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts who had gained the reputation in
their own locality of being thus distinguished.”

Bruce had his own candidate for the distinction and firsthand evidence to support his choice. At 3 a.m., when Bruce
realized what was happening, he sent a note back to Ladd to join him
immediately. At about 5, Ladd, who had a fast horse, rode off toward Richmond with
a 9th Vermont major. The major turned back, but Ladd rode on, reaching Capitol
Square before 6. A Confederate sailor tried in vain to stick him with his
cutlass before he returned to Devens’s headquarters. Many postwar histories identified Maj. Atherton H. Stevens
of the 4th Massachusetts Cavalry as the first
man to enter Richmond, but Bruce saw Stevens and his squadron far from the city
at 5:45 a.m.

“Whatever of honor or distinction attaches to the man who
first entered the Confederate capital belongs, without a doubt, to Captain Ladd,”
Bruce wrote.